In Love

In Love, 2001, 4 minutes, 2 channel video

In this video, I share eating an onion with my mother and my father. The video is played backwards so that we begin in a kissing embrace with tears in our eyes. As the video plays, the tears roll back up and an onion emerges from our mouths. As the title suggests, the video is about the abstract boundaries of love, sacrifice, familial relations and inheritance.

Eve Oishi writes of Patty Chang’s work in Camera Obscura, “Her performance pieces can be best described as balancing acts, not only in the way she manipulates her body but in her ability to create works that juxtapose absolute stillness with explosive tension, sly humor with incisive revelation, and penetrating commentary with emotional force.”